Grandaddy
Sumday: Excess Baggage
DANGERBIRD
Cult alt-rockers Grandaddy are applying a robust musical appendix to their iconic 2003 album Sumday for its 20th anniversary reissue: an expansive four-LP set dubbed Sumday Twunny that includes the original LP in remastered form, a four-track cassette demo version of each song, and a heap of B-sides and rarities from the immediate post–Sophtware Slump era titled Excess Baggage. The Modesto-based rockers broke up three years after this underrated LP was released, but reunited in 2012 to eventually drop a comeback album with 2017’s Last Place. Founding member Kevin Garcia passed away that same year, but frontman Jason Lytle said earlier this year that a new Grandaddy album was complete but with no release date yet confirmed.
That’s where we’ve traveled so far, and Grandaddy still vibrate on a different emotional level in 2023. The scrappy group always seemed like the small-town-California version of a stadium indie rock band, embracing the life of melodic tinkerers in the garage. Excess Baggage reexamines the promise of the crumbling computer age that Sumday and 2000’s The Sophtware Slump showcased so well, but under more relaxed auspices. The world has certainly devolved in the way we communicate as emotional human beings—through computers, through AI—since Grandaddy played with that ripe narrative. Lytle recounts those particular years of the band as a double-edged sword. “Sumday seems to be the center of it and where it all peaked,” he shared in a press statement leading up to this release. “To the journalists we were, ‘On the verge of greatness, underrated, overlooked, unsung.’”
As the world continues to catch up with their greatness, Excess Baggage is a reminder that the subdued nature of their music can make it easy to overlook. “The Town Where I’m Livin’ Now,” the lead single from the new collection, is a minimalistic paean to California’s Central Valley and a hallmark among the new collection. Lytle sings about small-town dry rot with an equal dose of dark humor and longing: “When you get here, the ‘Welcome to this town’ sign / It scares little kids with its skulls and its gore / When you leave here, the ‘Get the hell out’ sign is well-kept / And pretty with floral decor.” This town represents far more than itself, standing in for delayed adulthood and finding oneself in a sea of dissociative disorders and behaviors.
Elsewhere, the piano-led odyssey “My Little Skateboarding Problem” builds to a ragged guitar instrumental, and the folky “Derek Spears” zooms in on the entanglements of small-town milieu. Many of the record’s lyrics lean more on the folky side and detail strange Modesto melodramas: adults ride BMX bikes and stop to cry on lawns, girls wake up next to jerks in muscle shirts. This is a life that resembles a half can of flat beer, yet there’s beauty in all the sadness.
Sumday: Excess Baggage is a reminder of the hardscrabble power of Grandaddy’s early-2000s songwriting. Lytle’s music sits comfortably between the freeway exits of indie rock and electronica with a radio that keeps receiving spacey folk transmissions. It’s a ranging style that suits Grandaddy well, and it’s still hard to replicate over 20 years later.
